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Kathleen Edwards has been putting herself in all kinds of weird positions lately.

Over the phone from her Toronto home, the singer-songwriter who will be appearing on the main stage Friday night at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival says she’s been beating her city’s heat by swimming in the notoriously polluted Lake Ontario.

“A friend told me I’m probably going to grow a tail now, but I don’t care,” she says with a signature frankness that informs her music. “It was nice.”

Edwards is still on a bit of a high from her recent two-night stint as part of a Joni Mitchell tribute last month at Massey Hall, where she shared the stage with Rufus Wainwright and Glen Hansard of The Swell Season, and even got to sing backup for Mitchell on Woodstock.

“I couldn’t believe I was asked to participate and of course my answer was, ‘Yes,’ ” she says. “Then I remember thinking, wait a minute. All these people that are going to sing Joni Mitchell songs and she’s going to be sitting there, watching us do it. How weird is that? And then I realized I gotta just go and do this for myself and enjoy the experience. ”

Two hours before the show, the producer came to her with a request. Hansard had decided to cut down from five songs to four — Mitchell’s songbook is notoriously difficult for a singer because of her love of vocal acrobatics — and they needed someone fill in.

Edwards was happy to pinch-hit. “I’ve been playing Big Yellow Taxi since I was twelve years old at summer camp,” she says. “That was just the song that I always knew, like I knew Heart of Gold or Row Your Boat.”

The song was a crowd-pleaser and both evenings went off without a hitch. “Her fans were just genuine love and appreciation for her contribution to people’s lives,” Edwards gushes. “She was the soundtrack to so many people’s lives. It’s a very powerful feeling.”

But when it came time to meet the legend, Edwards held back. “I’ve been in the company of a few of my musical heroes over the years or opened for them, and I have this thing where I’m not going to force a moment,” she says.

“Their music has already played a part in my life. I don’t need my hero to acknowledge my existence. I don’t want to be disappointed by them not being available to share a moment with me.”

Instead she introduced the songstress to her father, who also grew up in Saskatchewan. “For him, she was a hero growing up, so I used my one opportunity to give him the chance to meet her,” Edwards explains. “I went up to her and I said, ‘Joni, I’d really like you to meet my Dad. He’s from Melfort.’ They shared this great moment, and I know it was really meaningful for my Dad. That was all I really wanted.”

For the folk festival, Edwards will be joined with her regular collaborator Jim Bryson, and plans to sing backup for her old friend, Vancouver’s Hannah Georgas.

This will also be the first time she’s shared the stage with ex-husband Colin Cripps since they broke up in 2008. The reunion is proving an unexpected stumbling block.

“It’s going to be kind of weird to sing certain songs,” Edwards says. “I don’t know how that’s going to work. There are probably certain songs I won’t sing in Vancouver.”

“I don’t know how that’s all supposed to work,” she says. “Sometimes I’m embarrassed that I even have to think about things like that. It doesn’t seem like it’s normal.”

Here she finds solace in a lesson from Mitchell, who told Jian Gomeshi in a recent CBC interview that, though the emotions in the songs were real, performing them is a kind of method acting.

“Those songs aren’t really raw for me anymore, but I want to deliver them in a way that feels true,” Edwards says. “So sometimes as a performer, I put on a character face and I decide that for one set, I’m going to live it. And then I walk offstage and my ex and I have a beer, and talk about how weird that was, and have a laugh.”

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